Recalling Maria Felix: Frailty, Thy Name Is Not Woman

“Frailty, thy name is woman!” When Shakespeare wrote those words for “Hamlet,” he could not have imagined there would someday be a woman such as Maria Felix.

First, full disclosure: Her death doesn’t touch me as much as it moves me to reflection. I never met her, I don’t idolize her, and I’d be lying if I said her films influenced me in terms of becoming a film director. By the time I was born, Maria Felix--Mexican actress of mythical proportions, inimitable life force, the yardstick by which the character of Latin women is often measured--had made 46 out of the 47 films that made her famous in Mexico and abroad.

She didn’t see any films of my generation because in her eyes all post-golden-age Mexican cinema was worthless: In one of her last interviews she said, “I don’t see any Mexican movies because I don’t feel like seeing bad stuff.”

Notwithstanding her contempt for us, there’s something about Maria Felix’s image as a celluloid heroine that is forever embedded in Mexican cinema--past, present and future--and something about her fastidiously designed image in real life that is part of Mexican identity.

Perhaps because my lovely wife, Andrea, is English and I’m Mexican, we’re always finding surreal parallels between our cultures. The latest has to do with the deaths, barely a week apart, of two iconic women from our glorious nations: the very Mexican Felix (“The Diva of Divas,” “Maria Bonita,” “La Dona”) and the very British Queen Mother (“The Icon of the Century,” “The Nation’s Favorite Grandmother,” “The Queen Mum”).

In the days since Felix’s death on April 8, a few lost souls have been vying for succession to the anachronistic title of “Diva of Divas,” a notion as preposterous as the idea of royalty in a country like Mexico. What is the purpose of royalty, or of divas for that matter, as we face the new century?

Does their “highness” help us cope with our lowness? Can we escape the vicissitudes of reality by attempting to fly with their melted wings? Felix asserted that being an actress means dreaming your life away so that others can partake of the illusion. Granted that “La Dona” was the quintessentially Mexican take on royalty. Was she completely out of touch with common people, or did she understand them so profoundly that she sacrificed her own person to create an everlasting myth? She held that she behaved exactly the same way in public as when she was alone in the sanctity of her restroom: always beautiful, invulnerable and dignified.

For the sake of her and our sanity, I want to believe that when she was truly alone she would remove the other mask, the one that cannot be covered with makeup, and occasionally shed a tear like those miraculous Madonnas that can’t be held wholly accountable for all the folly committed in their names.

For a crash course on Maria Felix I’d suggest the not-so-celebrated 1958 film “La estrella vacia” (“The Empty Star”), a grueling portrait of a beautiful woman who sacrifices it all in order to become a movie star. What’s fascinating is that it’s not one of those melodramas in which the protagonist is severely and misogynistically punished for her sins. She actually becomes rich, famous, independent and powerful. And she chooses to remain empty inside. Literally.

Due to an abortion, she cannot bear children anymore, but she takes it stoically, more like Clytemnestra than like the actress Sara Garcia (Mexico’s own favorite grandmother). There’s a certain sincerity and poignancy in this film that stands firm ground against the lifelong criticism that Felix received for being a diva, yes, but not a good actress. I was drawn to her precisely because she doesn’t view herself as a victim. On the contrary, she’s creating her own destiny, and if it’s hard being a woman, it’s even harder to be Maria Felix. Here’s a precursor of the great female roles that we are yet to see in this un-golden age of ours. Near the end of “La estrella vacia,” there’s a scene in which her father reassures her, “But you’re a good person,” and she vehemently replies, “Don’t say that!”

Which brings me back to the analogies with the Queen Mum, always full of palatable quotes: “You think I am a nice person. I’m really not a nice person,” the Icon of the Century once told a confidant.

It would seem that the primary raison d’etre of royalty in general, and of Felix and the Queen Mum in particular, has been to cultivate legendary images of themselves for the sake of “their” people. Despite the obvious differences--Felix exuded sex, the Queen Mum did not--both came from large families, became paradigms of longevity and ascended from simple origins to considerable wealth. Both were passionate about breeding horses.

Felix inherited 87 thoroughbreds from one of her five husbands, the one who called her “Puma,” and became, in her own words, the Queen of European Hippodromes. For the Queen Mother, racing horses allowed her a much-needed breathing space from the royal family.

Both spent lavishly: Maria Bonita would travel with suitcases bursting with cash--mind you, she only handled new bills--and she had the illness of silver, which could only be cured by Dr. Tiffany or Nurse Buccelati. Once a suitor in the shady form of a rich Mexican politician sent a planeload of flowers and chocolates to her film set, and she asked him to return it instead full of maize, rice and beans to distribute among the local Indians. Though she never handled bills herself, not even new ones, the Queen Mum incurred a bank overdraft of more than $6 million. While Maria virtually patented a style of smoking cigars, the Queen Mum kept in good health with a little help from gin.

On a darker note, both were indirectly responsible for the demise of a daughter and a son whom they tragically outlived: the Queen Mum is famously blamed for ruining Princess Margaret by thwarting her plans to marry a divorced war hero. Felix’s only son, Quique, professed a kind of iconic, quasi-Oedipal veneration for his mother, which was most eloquently expressed in his lifelong habit of collecting memorabilia about his own Queen Mum. Needless to say, he never married and was the subject of endless rumors about his sexuality. Surely Felix’s heart was torn apart when her boy, her “only true love,” died in 1996 at age 62, yet not a tear was shed in public. La Dona’s worries, her weaknesses, her humanity, were simply not part of the public persona.

Both ladies were adored by people; both were severely criticized for indulging in behaviors that scorned those very people who adored them. And both Her Majesty and “The Mexican” (yet another epithet) had a silent say in the respective timings of their deaths. The Queen Mum was determined to witness the new century and died during her sleep at 101 years of age, and Maria died exactly on her 88th birthday, also dreaming her life away till the end. No one would be surprised if La Dona went to sleep that night making a conscious decision to die and even forewarning God about rules and conditions to grace him with her presence in paradise.

The most striking thing about Felix’s funeral at the French Pantheon in Mexico City was to see thousands of incredibly humble people consumed by genuine, collective pain: We’ve lost her, our Maria Bonita is gone! Why this reverence for someone who had such a condescending, if not disdainful, attitude toward common people? Is it, once again, the psychology of 500 years of colonization? What is it about La Dona that made people stand in line for countless hours and behave as if they had lost someone rooted within them or who in some strange way symbolized them? Well, paradoxically enough, because she is and she does.

Felix, who was light-skinned and of predominantly Spanish descent, became famous for playing, among other things, indigenous women and Mexican revolutionary heroines. One theory for our people’s veneration toward her is the notion that she ennobled the race by playing these ethnic roles. Now, there’s a scary thought.

But even if Felix’s wasn’t a royal indigenous face, what a remarkable face it was! Crowned with eyes that could stare you down but chose not to see many things, her face was a cinematographer’s dream and a painter’s obsession, from Gabriel Figueroa’s sublimated lens to Diego Rivera’s failed marriage proposal. A face with a centripetal force that grabs you and won’t let go. Spirit giving voice to matter, character molding flesh and not vice versa.

By today’s paradigms of beauty, it was a face more like Angelina Jolie’s, attitudes and all, and less like La Dona’s compatriot Salma Hayek, whom, according to Mexican newspapers, Maria Bonita didn’t like very much. Regardless, Hayek, another icon in her own right, made a point of attending La Dona’s wake at the Palace of Fine Arts.

She wasn’t the only one: Fate had it that Maria Felix--who always had the last word, who never took orders from anyone, who seduced all her men, who would always be right about everything, and who would be caught dead before she’d ever have to wait for anyone--had to wait for her own coffin to be lowered into the crypt because the young pop star Thalia was approaching.

When she was spotted, mayhem erupted, people turned their backs on La Dona’s coffin and started asking the singer for autographs. The world belongs to the living. Would La Dona mind? Perhaps. Is this the passing of the torch? Never. Even Thalia remarked: “There won’t be another diva in the history of this country, not even me.” Unbelievable.

But no less so than the fact that there is an ossuary in Rome, the Cemetery of the Capuchin Friars, that bears an ancient tombstone with the following inscription in Latin: “Hic jacet Maria Felix” (Here lies, happy, Maria). May it be so.

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Salvador Carrasco is the writer-director of the “The Other Conquest,” which had a limited release in L.A. and will open nationwide this year.